Lake George attraction Fort William Henry to get remains from Canada

Associated Press

Published 11:55 pm, Tuesday, March 27, 2012

ALBANY — A collection of human bone fragments dating to the French and Indian War is expected to be returned soon from Canada to the Fort William Henry tourist attraction that owns the remains, a spokeswoman for the business said.

Liston participated in an anthropology project at the fort in the spring of 1993, when 15 skeletons that had been on display at the fort for decades were being studied before a planned reburial. But only three skeletons were reburied. The other 12 eventually were taken out of state, with the fort's permission, by Brenda Baker, another anthropologist involved in the project.

Liston eventually took the boxes of fragments with her to Canada.

In early February, the AP reported the whereabouts of the skeleton and bone fragment collections after Liston, Baker and fort officials publicly discussed the matter for the first time. The revelation surprised and angered some local officials and historians, who said they were led to believe that all the remains had been re-interred just before a highly publicized reburial ceremony held on Memorial Day weekend in 1993.

Viele said executives with the company, which owns the fort and the neighboring resort hotel, have been talking with Baker about returning the skeleton collection from the Southwest, where Baker has been a member of the faculty at Arizona State University since the late 1990s.

"We're working out details of how best to do that," Viele said.

Company officials have said they've allowed Baker to retain possession of the skeleton collection for so long because she has been storing the remains in climate-controlled conditions at the university. The fort lacks such facilities and had no plans to build any, the company said.

Fort William Henry was reconstructed in the 1950s as a tourist attraction in Lake George. The original fort, built in 1755 by the British, was captured and burned by the French and their Indian allies two years later, an event retold in James Fenimore Cooper's book "The Last of the Mohicans."

One skeleton is the focus of the opening segment of "The Decrypters," a new four-part forensics series debuting on the National Geographic Channel at 8 p.m. Thursday.